Caffeine has become the most prevalently consumed psychostimulant in the world, but its influences on daily real-world functioning are relatively unknown. The present work investigated the effects of caffeine (0 mg, 100 mg, 200 mg, 400 mg) on a commonplace language task that required readers to identify and correct 4 error types in extended…

Hungarian is a language with morphological case marking and relatively free word order. These typological characteristics make it a good ground for testing the crosslinguistic validity of theories on processing sentences with relative clauses. Our study focused on effects of structural factors and processing capacity. We tested 43 typically…

Over the past years functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) has substantially contributed to the understanding of language and its neural correlates. In contrast to other imaging techniques, fNIRS is well suited to study language function in healthy and psychiatric populations due to its cheap and easy application in a quiet and natural…

Using qualitative data collection and analyses techniques, we examined mathematical representations used by sixteen (N=16) teachers while teaching the concepts of converting among fractions, decimals, and percents. We also studied representational choices by their students (N=581). In addition to using geometric figures and manipulatives, teachers…

This article presents an investigation of the relationship between lesioning and neuroimaging methods of assessing functional specialisation, using synthetic brain imaging (SBI) and lesioning of a connectionist network of past-tense formation. The model comprised two processing "routes": one was a direct route between layers of input and output…

In the present investigation, 15 first term university students were faced with 80 context-based idioms in English (L2) and Swedish (L1) respectively, 30 of which were in the source domain of animals, commonly used in both languages, and asked to explain their meaning. The idioms were of varying frequency and transparency. Three main research…

This single case study describes the speech, phonological awareness and literacy of a 6;0-year-old girl with a cochlear implant. NG, a child with a congenital bilateral severe/profound hearing loss, received a monaural cochlear implant at the age of 3;0, three years prior to the study. Using a psycholinguistic framework to investigate her single…

Strategic text processing was investigated for English as a foreign language learners who processed and recalled a text when they read for expression, for image, and for critique. The results indicated that, although the amount of content recall (i.e., products of comprehension) was similar, the relative contributions of second language (L2)…

Linguistics and Communication Disorders are considered two different disciplines by most students and scholars in both fields as well as by researchers working in other relevant fields such as psychology and education. However, most core disorders, disabilities and delays in communicative ability directly concern language, especially in…

Marking number/gender agreement on Hebrew adjectives is a case in point: It is a challenging task requiring lexical and grammatical insight, a well-known source of processing errors in Hebrew usage. The current study examined impaired processing of noun and adjective inflection in adult speakers of Hebrew with dyslexia. Thirty normally reading…

In this paper we investigate how student disengagement relates to two performance metrics in a spoken dialog computer tutoring corpus, both when disengagement is measured through manual annotation by a trained human judge, and also when disengagement is measured through automatic annotation by the system based on a machine learning model. First,…

This dissertation uses the processing of anaphoric relations to probe how linguistic information is encoded in and retrieved from memory during real-time sentence comprehension. More specifically, the dissertation attempts to resolve a tension between the demands of a linguistic processor implemented in a general-purpose cognitive architecture and…

The Writing Pal is an intelligent tutoring system that provides writing strategy training. A large part of its artificial intelligence resides in the natural language processing algorithms to assess essay quality and guide feedback to students. Because writing is often highly nuanced and subjective, the development of these algorithms must…

This study investigated how varying the lexical encodings of technical terms in multiple texts influences learners' dyadic processing of scientific-related information. Fifty-seven pairs of college students read journalistic texts on depression. Each partner in a dyad received one text; for half of the dyads the partner's text contained different…

This research addresses the challenges of assessing receptive language abilities in minimally verbal children with autism spectrum disorder by comparing several adapted measurement tools: a standardized direct assessment of receptive vocabulary (i.e. Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-4); caregiver report measures including scores on the Vineland-II…